Designers of computer graphics applications continually strive to provide more interesting rendered scenes to viewers. For instance, many game developers work toward increasing the realism of rendered scenes. A scene that provides a realistic depiction of characters and background scenery is more likely to capture the interest of a player, that is, by immersing the player in the game. The player's heightened interest, if shared by many players, may translate into increased profitability of the game.
A number of difficulties confront game developers when attempting to improve the realism of rendered scenes. Increasing the appeal of a scene usually equates to increasing the complexity of the scene. The increased complexity manifests itself in a marked increase in the amount of data associated with the scene. More specifically, graphics applications represent objects (e.g., models) within a scene using a mesh of polygons —typically triangles —which, in turn, comprise a number of vertices (loosely referred to as “geometry data” herein). Increasing the complexity of the scene typically equates to a marked increase in the amount of geometry data. For example, consider the case of a simple game which pits two characters against each other. Each character is represented by a model, which, in turn, comprises of a set of geometry data. If a game developer desired to improve the realism of the game by increasing the amount of detail associated with the characters, or by adding more characters to the scene, then the amount of geometry data involved in rendering this scene could be expected to markedly increase. A scene that presented a whole army of such characters might be regarded as too complex to viably render in many game-playing platforms currently on the market.
More specifically, the above-described processing constraints arise from the demanding need to generate and process a large amount of game-related geometry data in the short amount of time necessary to render a scene in a typical game playing platform environment (e.g., a typical game renders a scene frame every 16 ms). This requires efficient algorithms for generating and processing the game-related data, as well as efficient strategies for moving this data from one module to another within the game console. More particularly, a typical bottleneck in graphics processing is the transfer of large amounts of data between the processing elements of the game console (e.g., the computer processing unit and/or the graphics processing unit) and the memory of the game console (e.g., the RAM memory of the game console).
Still additional drawbacks (to be specified in the following discussion) exist which may prevent game developers from improving the complexity, efficiency, and/or realism of rendered scenes.
Accordingly, there is an exemplary need in the art to provide more efficient systems and techniques for increasing the complexity of rendered scenes. There are analogous needs in the art to provide more efficient systems and techniques for processing large amounts of data in other data processing fields, such as audio and video processing.